Post-proletarian Tourism 259people.”^147 Politically themed itineraries proliferated in the 1960s, particu-
larly toward the anniversary of Lenin’s birth. Tourists in 1968, for example,
could choose tours of sites where Lenin had lived and worked around Lenin-
grad and in Karelia; they could refl ect on the military exploits of the Soviet
people by following partisan trails in Crimea. An independent group of six
cyclists from an Ivanovo meatpacking plant dedicated their 1971 vacation to
retracing the route of a local division in the war: they paid their respects at
war memorials and interviewed veterans along their way.^148
By the 1960s the educational and patriotic goals of tourism had come to
outweigh the health benefi ts of physical tourism. Tourists could develop
their patriotic knowledge in any number of ways, whether sitting on a train
or paddling a kayak. Theorists had formerly insisted that “the essence of
tourism was substantive, many-sided, recuperative rest while moving from
place to place.” The new essence of tourism, insisted the editor of Turist in
1967, was to create the Soviet person, fostering the highest moral qualities.
He disavowed the old proletarian tourism attitude that a tourist was only
someone who went on a complex long-distance trip in order to enhance his
qualifi cations as a master of sport in tourism. “Those who travel from Mos-
cow to Ul'ianovsk [Lenin’s birthplace] or to Brest in order to see with their
own eyes the places dear to the heart of every person, they consider them to
be pigeons or excursionists, but not tourists.” This was wrong, concurred an-
other offi cial: travel to see was the goal, and it did not matter whether it took
the form of independent adventure tourism by kayak, bicycle, or mountain-
eering; group travel through the mountains; twenty-day excursions by train;
or weekend outings with or without rucksack.^149 It was content that mattered,
not the means of conveyance. But Soviet tourism was also distinguished by
practices that emphasized collective and social ways of seeing. When the
post-proletarian tourist ventured away from home, the journey was still best
undertaken in groups.
The extreme importance of the collective remained one of the most endur-
ing features of Soviet tourism. The tourist group brought strangers together
to become friends and conquer obstacles together. “Tourism is a wonderful
world of rest, interesting new people, new friendships. It’s simply marvel-
ous when people of different professions, proclivities, cultural levels and
characters come together in a collective,” wrote the engineer Nikolai Petrov
in response to the Trud survey of 1966. The tourist group also provided a
mechanism for mutual inculcation of norms and discipline, an especially
- Trud , 26 June 1969 (quote); GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1746, ll. 24–25. A Siberian Kom-
somol offi cial had spoken of the need for patriotic itineraries “now more than ever” in 1962.
GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 447, l. 88. - Turistskie marshruty na 1968 god ; GARF, f. 9559, op. 1, d. 1448 (report on cycling
tourist trip, 1971). - GARF, f. 9520, op. 1, d. 1061 (central tourism council plenum, June 1967), ll. 163–
165 (quote); TsAGM, f. 28, op. 3, d. 6, l. 16.